The Morally-Challenged In Charge.

And it's getting worse.

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When I become despondent about the state of the world, which is quite often these days, I leave the RSS feeds about politics and wars to one side, and spend some time with reviews of new books and music, blogs devoted to expensive stationery, philosophy, esotericism, art and culture, until I feel a bit better. It was during one such period of recuperation recently that I happened across a review of a scathing new biography of The Piss-Artist Formerly Known as Prince Andrew. In rather old-fashioned English, a biography described as “warts and all” was one where the unflattering parts of someone’s life were included as well. So far as I can see, Mr Lownie’s new book, sardonically entitled Entitled, isn’t just warts and all: it’s pustules, boils, scabs, running sores, acne and toenail fungus too.

I’ve no intention of reading the book—which I understand is quite good—because the review itself was enough to make me feel ill, with its portrait of a deeply unpleasant, stupid and unfeeling individual. (I’ll come back to that third trait a little later.) Like a lot of people I had vaguely felt that there was something very wrong with Andrew, but not being greatly interested in the Royals anyway, and living in another country at the moment, much of it had passed me by. But then it struck me that if I had reacted so negatively to a précis of the life of this unpleasant buffoon, there must be some definable reason for that. After all, Andrew probably hadn’t committed any crime as such: the most he could be done for is probably misuse of his office as Trade Supremo for personal gain. So why did I, and the many who have read Mr Lownie’s book, and the many others who have pored, incredulous and glassy-eyed over stories of Andrew’s epic misbehaviour, react so negatively? And why did I, and many other people here in France, react just as negatively to the grisly stories of the unpleasant personal behaviour of the former Socialist Minister Jack Lang, which I recounted a few weeks ago, and which have continued to pile up since? On what basis?

There’s a fundamental distinction at work here. It’s one thing to read biographies of tyrants and really evil people who have done objectively terrible things, even if few tyrants and evil people are interesting in themselves. But by the time you’ve slogged your way, for example, through the two volumes of Stephen Kotkin’s massive biography of Stalin published so far, you’ve absorbed the sense of Stalin as a high-functioning paranoid psychopath, the ultimate Evil Bureaucrat and office politician, who read everything, memorised everything but understood little of importance. That is at least interesting and different.

It’s another thing to read biographies of tricksters, fraudsters, geniuses with self-destructive tendencies, artists who drank themselves to death, rockstars who died in their bath or painters who amputated parts of their anatomy. Or for that matter, biographies of people who suffered imprisonment, torture and exile, displayed heroism and persistence, or contributed something exceptional to the world in the arts, science, philosophy or even politics.

And finally, of course, when we read biographies of great historical figures, we expect them to have a mixture of virtues and flaws, some personal qualities that are admirable and others that are less so, to have made good judgements and catastrophic errors; all of which in the end simply makes them human beings.

All these accounts relate stories and describe behaviour towards which we can have relatively coherent reactions. We may disagree amongst ourselves, of course. We may find the actions of this or that political figure evil and indefensible, or conversely we may argue that they were in a situation where they had no choice but to act as they did. We may argue that this or that General was the greatest of a particular War. We may argue that this or that great artist ruthlessly exploited and betrayed others, but remains, nonetheless a great artist. There’s room for an assortment of views in such cases, but the rules of interpretation, if you like, are reasonably well accepted, and it’s possible to discuss them against a framework that most people accept.

Now it could be argued that Andrew is a special case, and I’ll come back to that. But I think he’s actually better seen as just a high-profile and not very interesting case of the tendency these days for public figures to be overwhelmingly boring, vacuous, greedy and generally unpleasant. He doesn’t even seem to be interestingly bad. Indeed, I’m struggling to think of any pubic figure at the moment, in business, in politics, in entertainment or just someone who’s well-known for being well-known, in whose sense of morality and ethics you could have the remotest confidence, and whom you might consider, even for an instant, taking as a model. This is, to put it mildly, unusual in history. I don’t think you’d find many people to defend Andrew, except, of course, within his own morally-challenged circle. (There is probably a series of books in preparation at the moment with a title something like Not Very Great Lives At All).

Ah, did I just say morality? There’s interesting paradox here. For an age supposedly marinated in relativism, we never cease to have strong moral opinions and make sweeping moral judgements about others (if seldom about ourselves) and to express these judgements loudly and aggressively. The whispering among suburban neighbours of my youth has turned into a never-ending carnival of moral outrage about everyone and anything, visible all the time to everybody. Yet very few people stop to think what is actually behind this knee-jerk shotgun moralism. So this week I want to look at morality as a practical, essentially political and social question, and examine some of the consequences of living in a society characterised by deeply immoral elites, full of confused and aggressive moralists, but without a coherent moral scheme to make judgements. Now let’s first be clear what I mean when I talk about morality, and how it differs from other types of judgement about behaviour: “morality” comes, after all, from the Latin mores, meaning “customs,” “rules” etc. Crucially, it is about how we decide to behave to others when we have an element of personal choice, and how we see their own behaviour.

We can think about the behaviour of others using a number of different criteria. We can say, for example, that what they have done is legal or illegal, that it obeyed explicit rules or it didn’t, that it was clever or stupid, that it was successful or unsuccessful. We can also say that it was Right (in the moral sense) or Wrong, which is where the difficulties start. And we can judge others, or maker our own choices in the same way. In a Liberal society, as I have often pointed out, the first of these criteria is all that really matters, although in some specialised cases following the rules of a particular institution might also be important. But Liberalism has replaced the old question “how should I behave?” with the new question “what can I get away with?” just as it has replaced “how should I live my life?” with “how can I be as successful as possible?” The result is perhaps the most amoral or immoral ruling class in the history of the West, for whom anything not explicitly illegal is fair game, and anything explicitly illegal is just a challenge to find your way around. On the one hand this evokes justified anger, but on the other hand it holds out the temptation to emulation.

In reality, we have to continually make everyday judgements on some moral basis where Laws or a Book of Rules aren’t going to help us. Since it’s topical at the moment, let’s consider the case of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington, and what followed. Reading through what’s been released so far, the average thoughtful person would very probably decide that Mandelson should never have been considered for such a post under any circumstances, and it’s astonishing that he ever was. His business interests alone, and the way he would subsequently benefit financially from his Ambassadorship, should have disqualified him. His party colleagues at least would have been aware of his deserved reputation for greed, backstabbing and ruthless ambition. And of course his relations with Epstein were common knowledge.

Any ordinary government servant in almost any country would have been refused an advanced security clearance in such a situation, let alone clearance to view Intelligence material, without debate and without appeal. The question was not, Is this person qualified to be an Ambassador in spite of some awkward personal contacts? it was, Is this the kind of person we want to send as Ambassador to Washington, especially since he apparently wanted to spend half his time being Chancellor of Oxford University as well? And then when told he had to resign, he managed to negotiate a severance payment, presumably by threatening legal proceedings against the government, although his contract provided for him to be dismissed without compensation at any moment. In other words, the popular judgement about Mandelson is on all the evidence an essentially moral one, not a matter of box-ticking, and most ordinary British people, I’m sure, would give a resounding “No” to the question. He’s not a fit person to send as an Ambassador and representative of the King and the nation, they would say.

Yet that’s not the way the British Government decided to handle it. I was looking through some of the material released recently, and it’s striking how little of Mandelson’s evident moral weakness is actually reflected in the correspondence, or in statements by Starmer. Yes says the latter, well, he didn’t know, and if he had known he might have acted differently, and he apologises to all the underage girls harmed by Epstein. Yes, really, as though somehow these two things were connected. I have here to join the long queue of people who are unable to understand why Starmer didn’t know Mandelson was not morally fit to be an Ambassador anyway, but I’d argue beyond that, that things have really gone downhill when the government doesn’t even seem to realise that that the man should never have been allowed within radioactive detection distance of the Diplomatic Service in the first place. They really don’t get it, after forty years of “what can I get away with before I’m found out and then how can I wriggle out of the consequences if I am?” being the moral standard increasingly used by elites.

So we face the curious situation that politicians and other members of the ruling class around the world are detested as never before, and partly because they are incompetent, yes, partly because they are crooked, but mostly because they are overwhelmingly unpleasant and ethically-challenged people. (And for that matter, many important public figures among the Famous are just as unpopular for the same reason.) Now it’s true that there are countries such as the United States, and parts of Africa, where public expectations of their politicians are already about as low and despairing as its possible to get, but that doesn’t mean that people are reconciled to this situation; quite the contrary. So in general, and in spite of forty years of Liberal indoctrination, we still find that popular criticism of politicians is not so much legalistic and procedural, as based on a disappointed sense of morality. The anger aroused by allegations that Mrs von der Leyen has personally made money, directly, or indirectly, from both the Covid and the Ukraine crises, will not go away if a report eventually clears her of doing anything technically illegal. Most people would simply reply that a person in a position of public trust shouldn’t behave like that, whether it’s technically legal or not.

As it happens, and for reasons quite unconnected with these essays, I’ve been preparing to write something about George Orwell, whom I have always admired greatly as a person and writer, and I was struck once more by the way in which Orwell’s moral vocabulary, and even universe, now seem so utterly removed from ours. For Orwell, the greatest virtues were honesty and authenticity, and his philosophy could be described in one word as “decency.” He didn’t really care what people thought about what he thought, and what he wrote, which is why he was a relatively unsuccessful journalist until the end of his life, attacked from all sides. Likewise, Socialism, I think, was for Orwell primarily a question of the creation of a decent society, where people didn’t have to starve or live in unhealthy conditions. (He was always very critical of Utopianists of all persuasions: as he said, the point of Socialism was not to make things perfect, but at least to make them better.) Winston Smith’s famous observation 1984 that “if there was hope it lay in the proles,” was not a fantasy of some future revolution, but a pragmatic judgement that for any kind of society to survive at all, it was necessary to rely on the decency found among ordinary people, which the Party had abandoned as thoroughly as our current ruling class has.

It’s hard to imagine such a vocabulary being employed today by our elites, or even at all. Orwell thought not simply that a decent society should be a political objective, but also that people should behave in their private lives and to each other with what he called “common decency.” That didn’t exclude some pretty sharp exchanges between Orwell and his opponents on literary and political issues, but all of his contemporaries agreed that he was never spiteful or personal. That sounds hilarious now, if you ever stumble accidentally into the slime-pits of contemporary social media, but it was much more the case in his day than now.

“Decency” has been made into an Unword now, along I suppose with “honour,” “honesty,” “courage,” “shame” and other expressions which now form part of the glossary handed out to students obliged to read literature published before about 1980. (Can you imagine a politician being asked today, as Joseph McCarthy was asked, “Sir, have you no sense of decency?” The very idea seems ridiculous.) It would be an easy response to say that, well, moral standards have changed, we have moved on, more things are now accepted and so forth. But that’s not really the point. We’re not talking about the details of private behaviour here, but about how we see others, and therefore how we behave towards them. The exaltation of the Individual inevitably produces a solipsistic world-view in which everything I experience is just a facet of Me, and things are only good or bad insofar as they benefit Me or not. Other people are there to be manipulated or profited from, or at worst are just Non-Playing Characters.

In personal relations, we are encouraged to express our wants in the form of a shopping list (I want someone who is …) rather than asking ourselves what qualities we ourselves have to offer that might attract others. Our relationships, even intimate ones, are becoming increasingly transactional. After all, when our existing relationship no longer provides sufficient of the required benefits we had earlier listed, it’s time to go, isn’t it? Responsibility? You must be joking. Likewise, most organisations now resemble a battlefield, or a free-fire zone, in which those in charge try to exploit those they lead, as those they lead try to get everything they can out of the system, and to exploit each other.

But it’s not all like that, and therein lies the interesting point. People may be obliged to respond to the shopping-lists of others to find a partner but they don’t really enjoy it. They may have to backstab their colleagues to keep their job, but they would prefer not to. Most ordinary people, like Orwell’s proles, have retained a sense of right and wrong, of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, a sense that our elites have clearly lost, and which applies at every level from the most mundane to the most fundamental. What’s the most mundane example I can think of? Well, how about the person who plays music very loudly on their mobile phone in a bus or a train, without consideration for others? If questioned, they would presumably reply that it’s a free country and they are doing what they want to do, and who are you to tell them they shouldn’t? (“Good manners? What the hell is that?”) There is, in fact, a direct if lengthly connection between that sort of antisocial behaviour and Mr Mandelson effectively blackmailing the British Government into giving him some money by threatening unpleasant publicity. (“Integrity? What the hell is that? Anyway, it’s not illegal.”) Yet it’s not immediately obvious how we provide a convincing answer to these sorts of objections about individual “rights,” and I’ll have more to say about that later.

All societies have recognised that that there are huge areas of human interaction that cannot be governed by written laws for well-remunerated lawyers to quibble about. Indeed, in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome, the distinction between “custom” and “law” did not really exist. There are societies I’m familiar with today in Asia and Africa where that is still essentially the case: you follow customs and “what we do,” rather than what some distant written code of law may say. Indeed, in some Asian societies it’s common to write laws in such a way that they can be interpreted, let’s say, flexibly. Modern western society is the first example in human history of an attempt to set down not merely traditional-style laws, but permissible and non-permissible everyday conduct in the form of explicit rules, governing in principle our entire lives. These may be actual laws, or subordinate legislation such as decrees, but they may also be internal rules and regulations, or even just amorphous “codes of conduct.” Their common weaknesses is the scope of their ambition in trying to impose rigid rules on human behaviour, and their failure to do this successfully leads, not to their abandonment, but to their multiplication, as ever more rules are introduced to try to compensate for the weaknesses and omissions of the current ones.

Perhaps you work in an organisation that has a “Code of Conduct” for, let’s say, potential discrimination against the “ableness-challenged.” It’s not technically enforceable, but in practice it is, and it’s usually written in such a vague fashion that almost anyone can violate it if they are not careful, which in turn could be grounds for dismissal. But the problem is that historically trying to bludgeon and frighten people into behaving in allegedly virtuous ways never works. (Ask any organised religion.) If you have an organisation that does not treat, let’s call them, disabled people fairly, then you have a bad organisation, run by ineffective people who don’t give a lead. Threatening your workforce about their behaviour won’t get you anywhere: we are back to the need for common decency again. If people in general don’t understand about treating others with consideration, then there’s a problem with society. It’s like having a written Vision or Mission Statement. If you have to write one, there’s something lacking in the management of the organisation in the first place. Moreover, the opposite is also true. If an employee, armed with an expensive legal team, manages to persuade a judge that technically no violation of some fatuous Code of Conduct can actually be proved, and that no law has been broken, then the individual might get damages and be reinstated, even if their actual conduct has been morally unacceptable.

All of this comes down to the the individual of course but in a rather different fashion from the frantic worship of individual rights which is such a feature of our times. The fact is that, as we go through life, we are continually confronted with small or less small moral decisions about what to do, and how to behave to others. Insisting on “my rights” at the expense of every other consideration doesn’t work, because others will obviously insist on “my rights” as well, and society as a whole will start to come apart, as is observably happening in some western countries. We’ll go into this point in a little more detail in a moment. But irrespective of “rights,” it’s important to recognise that any decision about how to behave in a given case is still an individual moral judgement.

The notion of the individual as a moral actor seems to have developed about 2500 years ago in various different civilisations, possibly connected with increasing social and economic complexity. Biblical scholars, for example, point to Deuteronomy XXIV, 16, which concedes that “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” At the time, this was a considerable step forward. Yet long afterwards, and indeed until very recently, the individual was nonetheless embedded in social structures which in turn expressed and to some extent enforced norms of conduct. Andrew’s behaviour is probably no worse than that of many royal princes or aristocrats in European history, but in the past there were officially-sanctioned and widely supported norms against which this behaviour could be judged, and which we have largely lost. For example, both the Protestant Church and popular satirists railed against the conspicuous consumption of the aristocracy, their arrogance and their love of fine clothes and jewellery, and in this they seem to have reflected popular feeling as a whole. (It’s not an accident, after all, that the rising middle class very publicly cultivated sobriety and virtuous behaviour instead). But we have moved today to a stage of ultra-liberalism, where I have a right to do Anything I Can Get Away With, and where the rich and powerful acknowledge no restraining moral imperatives at all, setting in the process trends that others may copy.

Understandably, people have never liked being morally restrained, and have resorted to various tricks to try to get round it. The idea of being not really responsible for your conduct endures in western culture in remarks like “I don’t know what came over me,’ reflecting a time where supernatural forces were thought capable of seizing control of people. More recently various forms of determinism have seen personal behaviour as entirely the product of one’s environment, thus removing individual moral responsibility altogether. Some theorists have tried to argue that the “oppressed” have no choice in their behaviour, or that it was the logical result of capitalist society or something. (And in an increasingly repressive and conformist western society, more and more people are turning to self-diagnoses of divergent mental conditions, as an absolute protection against being accused of this week’s favourite moral weakness.) More sophisticated defences of morally questionable behaviour have tried to “deconstruct” virtue and charity to reveal sordid motives beneath. Thus, if I give some money to a homeless person this is not an act of charity on my part, but rather an expression of the hierarchy of power that exists between us. My local supermarket hosts charity collections a few times a year, where people donate things they have just bought like tinned food, toilet paper and school stationary, for transfer to those who cannot afford to buy them. But of course, argue some, it’s better to keep your money, because all you are doing is enabling an unjust system to survive and prosper. I feel sorry for people like that.

There is also the fashionable idea that individual moral responsibility is anyway meaningless as a concept, because all individuals are simply members of groups that exist in objective states of dominance and submission to each other, and share the same characteristics. All allegedly good acts are just subtler exercises of power by dominant groups therefore, and so if one member of a group is guilty of something, they merely represent the essential nature of the whole group, and that whole group can be readily condemned and dismissed. (If this sounds reminiscent of nineteenth century essentialist racialism, well then it is.) Entire groups like White People and Men can harbour moral prejudices and desires of which they do not even have to be conscious, but of which they are all automatically guilty. You may have come across the appalling story of Gisèle Pelicot, who was the victim of mass rapes organised by her husband over a period of ten years, and has both waved her right to anonymity and written a well-received and dignified book on her experiences. Yet feminists were outraged that she made it clear that she did not believe that the men who had violated her were typical, and failed to condemn all men as equally guilty. Feminists maintained that male compassion for Gisèle was actually hypocritical, because all men would have done the same, given the chance. I feel sorry for people like that as well.

The problem of the need for something solid to base individual moral judgements on will not go away. Most people think that there is good behaviour and bad behaviour, and that this applies separately from, and in addition to, or even instead, of purely legal questions. Yet our modern society is increasingly set up to produce the opposite effect: amoral or even immoral behaviour is tolerated, and even featured indulgently in the media, thus potentially providing an example to others. Liberal theory has never really managed to sort this out. The first Liberals believed, or affected to, that human beings were rational, or could be made so with enough effort, and that collectively, rational behaviour would rebound to the benefit of society as a whole. Robespierre, in his famous speech of 15 February 1794 argued explicitly that only personal virtue would save the Revolution, and that to “purify morals,” a policy of Terror should be introduced. Although that was an extreme example, right up to the present day Liberals have never shirked their duty to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives, even if the “how” has changed a lot over the generations.

Because of course the rational pursuit of individual self-interest, which is what Liberalism is, does not necessarily lead to personal happiness, and by definition even less to a moral society. (That’s not a value judgement, by the way, we could also say “a society with a coherent moral system, whatever that may be.”) Logically, if we all pursue our rational self-interest, we will collide with others pursuing theirs, and our own rational self-interest will lead us in the direction of doing whatever we need to do to succeed, irrespective of moral considerations. Socrates had argued a very long time ago that only a virtuous life can make us happy, and so logically a life of pure rational self-interest would make us unhappy. Not everyone accepted this argument, even at the time.

Liberalism arose at a point when Christianity was the major moral force in society, and when the precepts of the Ancients about morality were also taught to all educated people. The assumption therefore was that the world had been designed optimally by God, who would intervene if really necessary, through Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand, to transform the consequences of individual greed and selfishness into something positive for society as a whole. Not everyone accepted that even at the time, either. But more widely, the mitigating effects of both Christianity and the Classical tradition, as well as the common decency of ordinary people, were mistaken by Liberals for universally-applicable and eternal rules which would always determine conduct. Take those away, as has increasingly become the case, and you have nothing left but selfishness red in tooth and claw.

Even today, we may live institutionally in a post-Christian world, but the structure of such personal moral standards as we retain comes directly from our religious past. Where else would we look anyway? There is a long history of failed attempts. And even today, a Church is the one place that will not turn you away whatever your condition (the same is true for other religions, yes). I was recently in the cleaned and restored Notre Dame (an experience not to be missed by the way) and I was told that one of the unexpected results of its closure was that lonely and unhappy people, who would spend most or all of their days in the Cathedral, treating it as a kind of surrogate home and knowing that they wouldn’t be moved on as in a shopping mall, were put out on the street. But absent any religious and social tradition of compassion and good works, why would anybody put themselves out to look after such people? What’s in it for them? Indeed, why would anyone behave well, when advantage could come from behaving badly? As I asked some time ago, what personal advantage is there in honesty?

Smith thought he had the answer to the wider question in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Essentially, he argued, we default towards that kind of behaviour which is generally approved of, and that therefore we wish to copy. Rather than there being a pre-existing “general rule” about how to behave “The general rule … is formed, by finding from experience, that all actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner, are approved or disapproved of.” But this makes enormous assumptions about the kind of society in question, and also fails to deal with the problem of moral defection.

What I mean by that last phrase is that Liberal society has no answer to the following Prisoners’ Dilemma kind of conundrum: if everybody including me behaves well, I receive no special benefit, but if everybody else behaves well and I behave badly I do receive a special benefit. So then why should I behave well? Arguments about the common good are not receivable, because in Liberal thought either there is no common good, distinct from the sum total of individual goods, or if there is it takes second place to the personal good of the individual. The conundrum is actually insoluble in the terms in which it is posed. It will always be advantageous for me to be dishonest if everyone else is honest, and nothing can be done about that.

The problem is made a lot worse by imbalances of power and wealth. The richer and more powerful you are, the greater damage your own selfishness will cause to society as a whole, but also the fewer restraints there are on your actions. This is why ordinary people know instinctively that selfish behaviour ultimately hurts everybody, and that the wealthier and more powerful you are the more damage you can do. Conversely, decent and altruistic behaviour, such as showing kindness to strangers, ultimately benefits everyone if it is done at scale. One obvious problem is that, whilst most people accept this view, it cannot be rationally proved. No matter how sophisticated the presentation, the argument boils down to the assertion that you should behave well because you should behave well, not expecting any personal benefit.

The other problem is that those in positions of power and wealth, those who infest the Internet and the airwaves, those whose influence and example are most easily visible, see no reason why they should behave morally just to benefit society, when it might mean sacrificing something they want to do or have. In this way, a dangerous gap with important practical consequences is opening up between the selfish, egoistic desires of the rich and influential, and the sense of common decency of ordinary people. It is not new, of course, but its extent is already unprecedented. And forty years of turbo-liberalism and the official abolition of Society as a concept suggest that the balance of power is moving increasingly in their direction.

Which is why Andrew’s unlovely behaviour is important. If it were just one thick, dull Royal it wouldn’t matter. But in fact his behaviour is typical of a new class with money but no morals, all entitlement, no example. Andrew’s ancestors were at least aware that they were expected to set a “good” example, and would be open to criticism, if they didn’t. Our current international ruling class, unencumbered by intelligence, education or even common sense, could not even understand such constraints, much less respect them.